A day-one firmware update is causing headaches for some new Wii U owners, according to reports circulating online. Consoles that lose power while the massive new system software is being downloaded and installed are reportedly being bricked.

L.A. Times reporter Ben Fritz is one of the most prominent people to tweet that his system was rendered useless by an interruption during the roughly 5GB download, which took over an hour to complete in our tests. Other users onTwitter and gamingforums around the Internet are reporting similar issues. While most users are reporting power interruptions as the cause of the bricked consoles, some reports suggest that losing an Internet connection during the download may cause similar problems.

Out of the box, the Wii U isn't useful for much more than playing games. The launch-day update is needed to activate system features ranging from the new Miiverse social network and online eShop to the ability to play older Wii games on the system.

Nintendo has yet to issue an official comment on the bricked consoles, but those new systems will still be covered by the company's standard 12-month warranty and should be freely replaced.

Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl

91 Reader Comments

At first I was going to be :wtf: confused that people were going to complain that they were surprised that turning your console off during a firmware update could brick the console. Then I read that losing your internet connection can cause this. Now I am :wtf: confused at Nintendo for designing a system in which a network outage can do this.

5GB might be okay in Japan but there are still a lot of households that prefer paying $20 for DSL compared to upwards of $80 for cable. I don't understand why they made the firmware a ridiculous size instead of having those features as separate apps, that won't brick the console if they're interrupted.

some reports suggest that losing an Internet connection during the download may cause similar problems

Quote:

system was rendered useless by an interruption during the roughly 5GB download

On the low end, let's say you can download this 5GB update at 4Mbps (the average broadband speed in the US in 2010, source) it's still going to take 2.75 hours just to download the update, let alone the time to install.

While I don't think the problem will be very widespread and should be easily fixed by just replacing the bricked unit, not having a way to back out of the update in the event of connection loss or power loss seems a little silly in 2012...

5GB? So if the basic edition only has 8GB of free space, and takes up 4.2GB with the pre-loaded software, they probably have to delete the old firmware to make room for the new stuff, hence the bricking (and they probably do the same thing for all the Wii U's, not bothering implementing a different system for different models).

Stupid? Well, yes, I mean flash is cheap enough that building a console with lots of download capability that only has 8GB of storage is frankly a little stupid, and they should only be doing a download of the changes (seriously, diffed patches are decades old at this point, not hard to do). This is why QA exists, you know.

I can understand a bricked console during a power loss, but losing your Internet connection can cause the same thing!? Please let this aspect be false. Otherwise, what the fuck is the download doing, applying the firmware byte-by-byte as it's downloaded!?

Wow. I had no idea that update was so huge. It took almost an hour for me yesterday and I just assumed it was because the servers were hammered due to it being release day. It's certainly not very encouraging to hear these brick horror stories.

It's not rocket science. There'e only one point where the system should ever be bricked to a point where an end user should not be able to recover it, and that would be between the bootloader checksum/install/verify phase should something go terribly wrong. And even then, it could easily be mitigated by putting in a very trivial emergency secondary boot loader that kicks in if the primary fails that will pull a signed image off a USB flash drive to try to recover the primary. But nooooo, we can't possibly make consumers' lives easy because that would amount to piracy.

How exactly is a five gigabyte day one download even a thing? What, is your patcher not implemented either?

It sounds to me like they're had the hardware boxed up and ready to go for some time, though looking at actual build dates might refute this point. If all the hardware is really old, it could explain why they feel the need to basically dump "retail" firmware on the system since the installed version is likely a pre-alpha limp-mode or whatever just to let people play some games.

Whether it's one or five gigs, this is ridiculous on day one in 2012 and should not be tolerated, but will because people loves them some Nintendo. Nintendo has a good enough overall track record that I don't think this will approach red-ring levels of intensity, their observed quality seems to make up for their tech gaffes.

Nevertheless, I'm going to hold out for a second or third run of the consoles to let other people beta test the system for me

1. Download compressed firmware, decompressing and dropping on the disk as it comes down.2. Verify that the downloaded firmware is correct (checksum match)3. Swap a "boot using this firmware" pointer to point at the new one.4. Reboot console.

There's basically no chance of bricking your machine with this. The only downside is that you need enough space to hold two full copies of the OS, but space is cheap in 2012 and Nintendo certainly has no compunction against holding back space for the OS on their new console.

You can even include a third mini firmware that has just barely enough functionality to get online and download a new firmware, in the case that the existing firmware is damaged somehow. You can have it triggered when someone holds down the eject and power buttons for 5 seconds when turning the console on or something.

This isn't rocket science. It shocks me that Nintendo holds back so much disk for the OS, but doesn't have space in the console to do safe updates and has to update the firmware in place during the download. At the very least if you have to do in-place upgrades, the emergency re-downloader needs to be in place and work, because you're going to need it.

I've tried Googling this, and I can't find an actual answer. Some people are reporting 880MB, others 5GB. Doesn't seem to be an actually reliable source for the real download size.

Seems easy enough, measure it at the router.

Xavin wrote:

I don't see how they fail to check checksums before applying new firmware. Nintendo really does live in their own little world.

Donnicton wrote:

How exactly is a five gigabyte day one download even a thing? What, is your patcher not implemented either?

Most of the features weren't installed to begin with.

The other systems warn of bricking when power fails too.

My guess on why the update on day 1: Different regions get different services. Shipping one firmware early on might simplify production (Wii did have separate firmware in each region at launch, for instance)

If people are getting different download sizes, either the number may not be accurate (he does say "apparently") or it may depend upon the model of the console. It might be possible that some of the firmware material is pre-installed on certain system versions, whether by size or by production date. Just unconfirmed speculation, though.

Edit: this is the earliest user report I've been able to find on the issue. He claims that he turned the power off after 15 minutes because of the rate it was taking to download (apparently he had a party). Also, of importance: apparently there is no "cancel" button. So once you start the download, you are committed to uninterrupted power/data consumption. Epic fail, indeed.

The claims that the update will brick your console if your Internet connection gets interrupted are most likely false. I just did some quick searching, and there are reports of people who lost their connection multiple times during the update and it did *not* brick their console, the download just resumed and all was well.

To all these people disputing the download size -- it doesn't matter how big the download is, it should be completed before the system does anything with the existing firmware.

(had to snip the image)

I agree with this. Generally speaking when updating the firmware for any hardware (and some software updates), disrupting it midway through will result is catastrophic failure of varying degrees. This should be the understood risk of any firmware update, but sadly it is not. You should normally download the required file in its entirety and then do the update. Although I am not entirely sure it doesn't already do this. This won't help if you lose power during the actual update, but at least it covers one sore spot.

That being said, this seems like more of a OS update, which could be mitigated more easily. Also it could be a combination of both. We don't really know.

You shouldn't force a full download of the firmware when you can just push out a delta/diff between the two firmwares. The fact that people can't figure this out in 2012 somewhat amazes me.

But iOS, Android, PS3, etc. firmwares are the same way where they force you to download the full firmware often over a slow connection.

Eh... it depends. If you have rapid updates, deltas can become problematic since they have to be applied in sequence. It takes non-trivial support infrastructure to automate creation of deltas properly, and I've only seen a handful of services actually pull it off.

That said, for something like a day-one console update, where pretty much every console should be on the same initial version, coupled with the fact that the update is a staggering 5GB... Yeah, a delta should have been used here.

The update being 5GB is clearly misinformation. Nintendo's servers are slammed so the update is running really slow. However, I checked my bandwidth before and after the update and the ended up download about 0.88GB.

Here's the size when the update was close to 50% done:

I was getting speed of 3,000kb/sec so it took me around 45-50 minutes to download the update.

Mine was bricked out of the boxwith a disc read error after waiting six hrs in line. Of course i was mad but at least i got it out to play with it before wrapping it up and putting it under the tree for my kid. Then I would of been really upset come Christmas morning. I expect more out of Nintendo but was let down big time

That's for when applying the update, not downloading. It also shouldn't happen except for a very small core piece of functionality that knows how to download and install the OS. There's no reason that failure to install the whole OS should be a brick, this is 2012.